Workfare – making unemployed people do unpaid work in jobs that would normally be done by paid workers – is triply unfair. Firstly, it is unfair to unemployed people –unpaid work is exploitation, pure and simple. Secondly, it is unfair to workers – when they have to compete with workfare conscripts some workers will lose their jobs, others will find that their pay, overtime or other conditions deteriorate (and the workers who lose most will be the weakest and lowest paid.)

Thirdly, it is unfair to other businesses. Employers who don’t use people on workfare will find it difficult to match competitors who are effectively being subsidised. You don’t hear this point very often, but progressive businesses have a very good reason to oppose workfare.

Workfare isn’t the only unpaid work that’s around at the moment. Plenty of government employment programmes offer “work experience” which may not be substituting for the work of other workers but still has all the other characteristics of a job.

Trades unionists know bad work experience when we come across it. We recognise it when unemployed people tell us about programme providers who send them off to do a few days’ work for no pay, with no training and no expectation of an interview, let alone a job offer. You have to suspect that this is simply about making an unscrupulous employer an offer they have no intention of refusing.

But work experience isn’t necessarily a problem. Where unions negotiate for voluntary paid work experience, leading to an interview or job offer and safeguards to protect existing workers it can be a win-win solution to a serious economic problem. Job guarantees, that create real jobs for unemployed people could help prevent the emergence of a ‘lost generation’ of young people.

The best answer of all would be is a growing economy, creating the jobs unemployed workers desperately want. And that means that the government must accept that austerity is choking growth.

Newcomers to the top 10 employment blackspots include Caerphilly in Wales and Medway in the South East with around 15 claimants chasing each vacancy .

Current top 10 Employment Blackspots

Source: ONS NOMIS

To download full analysis   

The top 10 ten employment blackspots for young people (18-24 only) based on the claimant count figures released today are:

Source: ONS NOMIS

Blaenau Gwent continues to be at the top of the blackspot areas.

To download full analysis

While there are still many more women than  men who report that they do not want full time work (854,000 men as opposed to 4,287,000 women at the last count), there has been a notable decrease in the number of women who do not want full time work. This is matched by an increase in women who are working part time because they can’t find a full time job.

Increasing rates of part time work amongst women are often seen as unproblematic as there’s a presumption that all women with children want to work part time (never mind the fact that many are lone parents and have no other source of income, or are the main breadwinner or sole earner in a couple and cannot afford to work part time, or they simply like their jobs and want to work full time).

In fact, you don’t have to dig too deep in the depths of the ONS labour market data to see that increasing numbers of women are finding themselves in part time work, not through choice, but through lack of full time alternatives.

The number of under-employed women has increased by 74 per cent.

There are noticeable regional variations too with the number of women trapped in involuntary part-time work has more than doubled in Northern Ireland and London since December 2007.

The ONS data shows that while the number of women who are working part time but would like to be full time is on the rise, the number of women working part-time who don’t want a full-time job, often because of family and caring responsibilities, has been falling. I’ve tried to illustrate the changing pattern of involuntary versus voluntary part time work with a chart.

 Part time women who could not find a full time job (red line – right axis) compared to part time women who did not want a full time job (blue line – left axis)

With the threshold for receiving tax credits set to change from 16 hours to 24 hours, those stuck involuntarily in part time work are set to lose out yet again.

Furthermore, under Universal Credit, new conditions will be placed on in-work benefits which will mean that employees earning less than £212.80 per week will be obliged to work more hours or face sanctions.

Where all of this extra work is meant to be found remains a mystery. 

The proportion of women working part-time that don’t want a full-time job, often because of family and caring responsibilities, has also been falling. This shows that the recent rise in part-time employment has mainly come about through necessity rather than choice.

Number of people doing part-time work because couldn’t find full-time jobs,Q4 2011 (by region and gender)

(Quarterly Labour Force Survey, October – December, 2011)

The analysis suggests there is a link between between rising under-employment and rising overall unemployment, with the North East and Northern Ireland struggling on both measures.

People living in the East of England have experienced the sharpest increase in under-employment over the last four years, with the number of men trapped in part-time jobs more than trebling to reach 58,385. The North East, Northern Ireland and London have also experienced sharp increases in involuntary part-time work. The number of women trapped in involuntary part-time work has more than doubled in Northern Ireland and London since December 2007.

Percentage increases in involuntary part-time work, Q4 2007–Q4 2011, (By region & gender)

(Quarterly Labour Force Survey, October – December, 2007 & 2011)

(To download full analysis)

While we had good news last month that overall unemployment fell so too did the number of people in full-time work. While part-time or temporary jobs may be, better than no work at all, people are having to take huge salary sacrifices, reduce their hours and trade down their skills to stay in work. This is bad news for the family finances and the UK’s overall economic performance as people are not working as much and as productively as they could do.

Creating more well-paid, skilled, full-time jobs is the only way to secure a sustainable recovery that works for everyone, as it will raise people’s incomes and help them to work at their potential again.

What can Government do to create more paid work? And how do we get better quality jobs – both more fulfilling and rewarding for individuals and better for the economy? This is one of the topics being discussed at the upcoming TUC Conference – After Austerity.

With the country facing a decade of economic stagnation we need real change if we are to secure jobs and living standards for the future. At the conference, expert speakers will share their in-depth knowledge and expertise on how to rebuild the UK economy through securing strong and sustainable growth.

To view the conference programme and to register go to www.afterausterity.org.uk

Even those proposals that go in the right direction have too often been watered down so we have a green investment bank that is not a real bank and executive pay curbs that lack teeth.

What is worst is that ministers are wrapping up a real attack on rights at work as good for growth and employment. Those who opposed the minimum wage and rights for paid holidays are using the recession as a cover to introduce policies that they know have little support and that will be seen as nasty by most. There is no actual evidence that making work insecure does anything for the economy – easy fire will not lead to new hires.

This is no more than a bad boss’s charter that will make people insecure at work and will feed straight into lower consumer confidence.

Even where legal protections remain, the government is to undermine them by reducing inspections or making it far more difficult to take tribunal cases – which have been falling over the past year, contrary to claims from some business organisations.

The UK already has the second lowest level of worker protection among the 36 rich countries in the OECD, and the government has made it possible for employers to sack staff for no reason for up to two years from when they start. The government’s own surveys show that excess regulation is cited by only six per cent of small and medium sized businesses as a big barrier to growth. Their real problems are the depressed economy and difficulties with bank lending. 

This agenda is likely to be controversial within government. The lack of evidence that it will help the economy shows that this is driven by the hard-right agenda set out in the secret report by Wonga owner and Tory donor Adrian Beecroft. Those who opposed the minimum wage are using the economic crisis as an excuse to roll back modest employee protection.

In particular we will oppose lump-sum benefits in lieu of maternity pay and cuts to maternity rights that will particularly hit poorer mothers. ‘Protected conversations’ in which employers are free from legal constraints are deeply unfair to employees and likely to be unworkable in practice. Removing rights from staff in small businesses will turn them into second class citizens at work, and make it harder for smaller firms to recruit good staff.

Of course any modest increase in rights to request flexible working is welcome, but this should not obscure the fact that this government is taking the workplace backwards

Rumours of the demise of big firms are premature. In fact, 49. per cent of private sector employees still work for large businesses (defined as employing 250 people or more), 15.5 per cent work for medium sizes businesses (50-249 employees) and 34.8,  work for small businesses (1-49 employees).

Without underplaying the contributions that small enterprises make to the UK economy, it is also a fact that 3.4 million UK businesses are sole traders – eg they consist of 1 self-employed person working alone. Sole traders account for 75.6 of all UK businesses. Most will at best continue to be  “trundlers” rather than taking off in a big way.

Finally, add the public sector into the equation, and we find that just 8,600 enterprises account for 52.2 per cent of all UK employees.

Source: http://www.bis.gov.uk/analysis/statistics/business-population-estimates 2011.

Even so, it’s very hard to get enthusiastic about this; indeed, when you look a bit deeper, there’s some very worrying trends. The big factor was summed up in Duncan’s labour market in one chart yesterday: the overall improvement is masking a longer-term stagnation in full-time employment. In other words, we’re paying for a slow improvement in unemployment with high levels of underemployment – it isn’t just part-time employment that’s been rising, it’s also the number of people who say that they’re working part-time because they couldn’t get a full-time job:

 In fact, it’s a broader problem than this, there is also the matter of involuntary temporary employment – there are 627,000 temporary workers who say they couldn’t get a permanent job, up 26,000 in the last six months. And a great deal of the increase in employment is actually an increase in self-employment.

In the table below, we show the effect of six successive months’ change. Total employment has gone up by 70,ooo – but that is the net effect of a 46,000 fall in the number of employees and a much bigger increase in the number self-employed. Similarly, there has been an 85,000 fall in the number working full-time and a bigger increase in the number of part-timers.

 Overall, during this period, the number of employees working full-time has fallen by more than 137,000.

It’s also worrying that the benefits of the rise in employment aren’t being evenly shared. During the same period, there has been a much bigger increase in the number of men in employment than the number of women, and women’s employment rate has actually fallen:

 And the geographical distribution of gains has also been skewed, with the overall improvement disguising much poorer performance in some regions, especially the North West:

Regional labour market statistics are much more volatile than the national ones, so the figures for the North West and the East Midlands may improve, but this is another reason for only giving the employment figures one-and-a-half cheers.

We have previously reported that West Dunbartonshire has featured regularly in the top 10 employment blackspots.

Current Top Ten Employment Blackspots

To download full analysis

The top 10 ten employment blackspots for young people (18-24 only) based on the claimant count figures released today are:

Blaenau Gwent has consistently been at the top of the blackspot areas since we have been reporting on youth unemployment blackspots (September 2011).

To download full analysis

The human cost of redundancy for workers is very clear, but do companies really have to engage in a “sack-race” every time the economy slows down? This question will be the topic of the TUC’s Alternatives to Redundancy summit on 26 April.

Racing to redundancy can cost businesses an awful lot of money. As well as the direct costs of paying off their workers, there are also the indirect costs of the management time spent implimenting the process. Once the redundancies are complete there is inevitable damage to staff morale and productivity in the subsequent period. Finally, when the economy begins to recover, there are the costs of recruitment and training to re-fill the jobs that people had previously been paid to leave the organisation.  

There are a range of other strategies that businesses can use to improve efficiency or reduce costs. These include improving business planning and targeting investment to improve productivity (and remember that the money may well be there as the UK corporate sector is currently sitting on record levels of financial reserves while business leaders wonder what will happen next), and proper planning and development of workplace skills.

A strategy to minimise redundancies would also include a freeze on recruitment (this sounds obvious, but does not always happen). With  the support of the employees and their trade unions, it might also include working reduced hours or even temporary stoppages for a short period. There could often also be a role for secondments, lending out some key workers and recovering some of the cost of their wages.

In order to help employers and trade unions develop better strategies, the TUC is holding an Alternatives to Redundancy summit here at Congress House 1.00-3.00 on Thursday 26 April, with contributions from:  

• Brendan Barber, General Secretary TUC
• John Taylor, Chief Executive ACAS
• Sarah Anderson CBE, Chair Call Britannia
• David Lennan, Co-Founder StaffShare
• John Duncan, Group HR Director, Royal Mail
• Sir Steve Bullock, Chair of the Workforce Board, Local Government Association

Andrew Burke, Chair of Crisp Thinking will moderate the debate.

Registration is free, using the link below:

http://redundancyisntworking.eventbrite.com/

Please note that this event will be filmed for future release.

The analysis looks at industries including construction, manufacturing, retail, hotels and restaurants, and the finance and business services sector. The analysis found that the types of jobs that account for over half of all youth employment – manufacturing, construction and retail, hotels and restaurants – have shed nearly a million jobs since 2007.

The number of manufacturing jobs fell by 14 per cent between the last quarter of 2007 and the last quarter of 2011, a loss of 406,000 jobs. The construction sector had the next biggest fall losing 281,000 jobs (12 per cent of all construction jobs).

The retail, hotel and restaurants industry has lost 221,000 jobs since the end of 2007, a fall of three per cent. Four in ten young workers are employed in this sector, compared to just one in six workers over the age of 25.

Finance and business services is the only sector to have expanded since 2007, gaining 98,000 jobs (up two per cent) over the last four years.

The relative health of finance and business services has helped to boost pay for workers in this industry. Wages have increased by 11.3 per cent since 2007, compared to an increase of just 0.2 per cent in construction and 6.7 per cent in retail, hotel and restaurants.

However, with RPI inflation increasing by 13.5 per cent over the same period, the wages of all workers have fallen in real terms.

With the Office for Budget Responsibility now forecasting that wages will continue to fall in real terms until mid-2013, three years on from when wages last rose, the outlook is looking tough for both job seekers and those already in work.

Workforce jobs by industrial sector, 2007–2011

Source: Labour Force Survey (LFS)

 Monthly earning data by industrial sector, 2007–2011

Source: Monthly wages and salaries survey

 Number of workers by industrial sector and age group

Source: LFS

 * The longer definition of “distribution, hotels and restaurants” is “wholesale, retail, the motor trade or hotels and restaurants”, as used in earlier tables.

No, it doesn’t seem like that now, with an even more confusing range of benefits – so, over at the TUC website, we’ve put up a guide to the 15 schemes that are running at present. Enjoy.

Government also recognises that the best route out of unemployment for some young people will be starting up in business, but that it can be difficult to obtain the skills and capital required. Building on the support already availible, including the New Enterprise Allowance, later this year the Government will pilot the best way to introduce a programme of enterprise loans to help young people set up and grow their own business.

Great. A pilot scheme with an unspecified number of places (from which, read ‘it’s very small’) to enable young unemployed people to take on loans which, if their businesses fail, will leave them with additional debts to be repaid through their JSA. Meanwhile, more than one million young people continue to look for jobs, the total amount of support available via the Youth Contract remains 26 per cent less per year than was previously provided and companies get another £800 million off their tax bills.

As colleagues have blogged before, public sector pay supports local and regional economies, ensures fairness and transparency and promotes equal pay. Moving away from this to a system that would entrench the North-South divide for generations is unfair, inefficient, makes no economic sense, will increase inequality and is simply not supported by the evidence. A move at this stage would also pull the rug from under the independent pay review bodies, who have already been asked to investigate the question and won’t report until July.

The issue of local and regional pay rears its head every few years under Governments of different persuasions, but usually goes quiet when the complexities and risks are exposed. This time round, the Government fired the starting pistol in the Autumn Statement, when the Chancellor asked the public sector pay review bodies to look at how public sector pay could be made “more responsive to local labour markets”

Four of the independent pay review bodies are currently conducting these reviews , gathering detailed evidence from unions and other stakeholders, and are due to report in July. The TUC has just submitted formal evidence, as have the health unions that make up the NHS staff side.

These reviews don’t cover the whole public sector workforce (see here for more details), but their investigations will gather evidence and views to inform decisions about future policy. Any move to introduce local pay in the Budget - however limited – would be in bad faith, undermining these reviews and the independence of the pay review bodies.

In the TUC’s evidence to the Office of Manpower Economics, which supports the pay review bodies, we argue a series of points.

Our starting point is that paying nurses, teachers and Jobcentre staff less in the poorer parts of the UK is simply unfair. The jobs require the same level of skills and qualifications as they do in wealthier areas, and can be more challenging in low income areas where public sector workers have to deal with the consequences of inequality such as poorer health. Most people would say that it is fairest to pay people for what they do, not where they live.

It is also clear that local pay will damage the economy: cutting public sector pay in the poorer areas of the country will take money out of people’s pockets that they would otherwise spend on private sector goods and services, causing a knock-on effect on the whole economy as demand is choked off in sectors like retail.  For instance, if local pay led to a 1 per cent pay cut in the North West, this would take £190 million out of the regional economy – and that is before the multiplier effect on the private sector is factored in.

Far from making it easier for private companies to take people on, it would weaken the economy in the very areas where the recovery is at its most fragile. It is not credible to suggest that the public sector is crowding out the private sector when the latest figures show there are an average of 5.6 unemployed people per vacancy – a figure that is much higher in poorer parts of the UK such as West Dunbartonshire (31 claimants per vacancy) and Middlesbrough (23 per vacancy).

Third, the evidence for local pay does not stack up. Outside London and the south east of England, there is in fact little difference in earnings between regions. Regions tend not to have homogenous labour markets, but to have pay “hotspots” within regions, which are similar to hotspots elsewhere in the country. IDS research based on ASHE data finds that, excluding London and the south east, the median weekly earnings for full time employees in April 2010 only differ by £48 between the lowest and highest paying regions.

Advocates of local public sector pay argue that private sector pay is set in line with local labour markets. In fact, IDS found that big multi-site private employers like supermarkets generally have national pay arrangements with some local additions to reflect the higher cost of living in London and the South East: very similar to the flexibilities that already exist in the public sector. Rather than geography, the main determinants of pay levels are skill level and qualification level, and large private companies often use international rather than local pay data.

Fourth, local pay is inefficient. At the moment it is not clear whether the Government is looking to localise the process of pay bargaining as well as pay itself. If bargaining is localised it will mean replicating the evidence-gathering and negotiating process in thousands of public sector employers, taking up significant time and resources and requiring skilled input. Local managers will either be diverted into dealing with these complex negotiations instead of managing services, or will turn to expensive consultants to provide support, further building up costs… or both.

And actually applying local pay, whether or not it is bargained locally, is fraught with difficulties. Would pay be determined by where someone works or where they live? Would it be measured against local housing costs and if so would it be the rented or owned prices? How would rural areas with higher travel costs be compensated?

There is also a big equality risk to local pay. The current national pay systems such as Agenda for Change in the NHS have been developed with detailed equality-proofing in mind. Localising pay, especially bargaining, could increase the risk of unequal pay and expensive and time consuming equal pay challenges.

Finally, one of the arguments used by supporters of local pay has been that there is a gap between public and private sector pay. We have written about this many times (see here, here and here for some examples), highlighting the differences between the sectors: yes, median pay in the public sector is higher than in the private sector, but that disguises important differences between the sectors: more people have higher qualifications in the public sector (doctors, teachers); the gap between top and bottom pay in the public sector is smaller than in the private sector, as is the gender pay gap; and higher paid people are paid less in the public sector. The real difference is endemic low pay and out-of-control top pay in parts of the private sector.

And a postscript: the politics of all of this are interesting, with senior Liberal Democrats expressing concerns about the idea and some briefing trying to downplay the weekend’s coverage.

Follow @payfairnow on Twitter for updates on the TUC’s campaign for fair pay

The latest Labour Market Statistics appear to show, at first glance, better news with employment growing and a lower rise in unemployment. However a more detailed examination of the figures shows that a large rise in ‘under-employment’ is continuing to disguise underlying weakness whilst wage growth has slowed sharply.

The number of women in work rose 10,000 this quarter to 13.5 million. Female unemployment also rose because more women are entering the labour market having previously been inactive.

This makes the increase in women’s unemployment sound like it’s really a good thing, a sign that the labour market is working well, which didn’t sound right. And it isn’t. In fact, the most likely reason for this shift is the gradual rise in women’s state retirement age. 

Let’s start off by looking at the data that the government’s claim is based on. Over the past year there has been an increase in the number of women who are unemployed and  in the number who are employed whilst at the same time the number who are ‘economically inactive’ has fallen.(*) To make matters more complicated, we have to take into account the fact that the number of working age women is growing:

Once you take rounding into account, the increase in the total number of women in this age group plus the fall in economic inactivity equals the increase in employment plus the increase in unemployment.

The age group is important. It’s difficult to get consistent data for all women over 16 so everyone who looks at these figures has used the results for women aged 16 – 64. These figures are often referred to as the “working age” figures. And, of course, for men 16 – 64 is currently working age. But not for women – women’s state retirement age is currently 61. The key thing to remember for later on is that this age group is made up mainly of women of working age plus some women over retirement age.

The other thing that worried me about the implication that what we have here is a benign movement of women into the labour market was what happened when you look at whether or not the reduction in economic inactivity was among women who wanted jobs. Because the definition of economic inactivity covers everyone who hasn’t got a job and doesn’t meet the tight definition of unemployment, there is a large minority (usually about 2 – 2.5 million people) who say that they want work. If the reduction in inactivity was positive, you’d expect it to be concentrated among that group.

But it isn’t:

That is certainly not what I expected.

So the next stage is to break down the change over last year to more specific categories than in my first table – to each of the different reasons for economic activity that are covered by the Labour Force Survey. These include being a student, being sick, looking after home or family and being retired. For men, that last category is early retirement but for women it includes some early retired but others who are over state retirement age and are therefore retired properly. In the latest figures there are 469,000 men in this group and 1,036,000 women – more than twice as many.

If we calculate what proportion of women aged 16 – 64 was in each of these categories in Nov – Jan 2011 and then apply the same proportions to the population in Nov – Jan 2012 we can see how we would expect the numbers in each to have changed.

There’s several interesting points here. For one thing, the results for the sick and disabled categories suggest that the harsher test for disability benefits may be having an impact. But what jumps out is the difference between the expected 2,000 increase in retired women and the actual 58,000 fall. Not what you’d expect given that we have an ageing population.

What makes sense of this change is the fact that, during 2011, the state retirement age for women was gradually rising – it rose every other month as part of the structured increase in women’s pension age, first to 65 and eventually to 67.

It isn’t that women fancied their chances of getting a job and so “are entering the labour market”. It’s the fact that fewer of them are now over state retirement age; when the Labour Force Survey asks them what they are doing, they reply that they are unemployed or looking after their family or home. Some are probably women whose employers encouraged them to retire when they reached 60.

This would explain why women who didn’t want a job were as likely to have moved from economic inactivity to unemployment as women who did want one.

This is not a positive story at all, it’s a story of women who had to put off retirement because government policy made them do so at precisely the time when the labour market was unable to deliver them a job.

(*) The labour market statistics put everyone in three large groups. There are people in employment and people who are unemployed (these two together are sometimes called the ‘economically active’) and people who are ‘economically inactive’. To be counted as unemployed you have to not have a job, be available for work at fairly short notice and have been looking for a job recently; if you don’t have a job but don’t meet the other criteria you are economically inactive. (By the way, I try not to shorten this to ‘inactive’ – it’s a group that includes lots of people like carers who are very active.)

Since we have been reporting on employment blackspots (March 2011), West Dunbartonshire has featured regularly in the top 10 employment blackspots, the only exceptions being September, October, and December 2011.

Download full analysis 

The top 10 ten employment blackspots for young people (18-24 only) based on the claimant count figures released today are:

Since we have been reporting on youth unemployment blackspots (September 2011), based on the claimant count rate Blaenau Gwent has consistently been at the top of the blackspot areas.     

Download full analysis 

The report shows that despite progress, women’s employment in the private sector remains concentrated around the five ‘Cs’ – caring, catering, cashiering, cleaning and clerical work. As a result the gender pay gap for women working full time is twice as high in the private sector (18.4 %) as it is in the public sector (9.2 %). In contrast many women working in the public sector work in associate professional or professional level jobs. And although part-time women suffer a significant pay penalty in both public and private sectors this is lower in the public sector. It is also still the case that a substantial part of the female workforce is employed on a part-time basis (43% of women compared to 13% of men).[i]

Gender Pay Gap – Breakdown for median hourly earnings, excluding overtime, for public and private sectors (2011 data)

Analysis carried out by the TUC using data from the Annual Survey of Earnings 2011 (using Gross Weekly earnings ) further explores pay for women in the public and private sector. This analysis finds that:

• Almost a third of women (28 %) working full time earn less than £300 in the private sector compared to (8 %) in the public sector.
• Over half of all women (56%) earn less than £300 in the private sector compared to just over a third (35 %) in the public sector.
• Over three quarters of women working part time in the private sector (77 %) earn less than £200 compared to less than half (47%) in the public sector.
• Low paid jobs are far more prevalent in the private than public sectors, with 17 per cent of full-time workers earning less than £300 in the private sector, compared to only 6 %of public sector workers
  

To view the full analysis – download full report  

Charts 1 and 2 from the analysis highlight the proportion of full-time women and men at different earnings intervals. It is clearly evident from the charts  that women in full-time jobs are more evenly spread through different earnings levels in the public sector than in the private sector where they are more concentrated at the lower end of the income distribution.

Chart 1: Private sector distribution of gross weekly earnings for full-time employees 2011

Chart 2: Public sector distribution of gross weekly earning for full-time employees 2011

(Source – ONS)

It is not just the smaller gender pay gap that women benefit from in the public sector; the public sector has been a better source of flexible work and well paid part time work for many women as well as offering better pension provision. The public sector has been more responsive to the needs of women by offering more skilled, well paid, part time jobs.

The report shows that the impact of cuts in public sector jobs will be severe on women as they make up 65 per cent of the public sector workforce. Even if women are able to find employment in the private sector will it match the pay, pension and employment prospects of the jobs they have lost in the public sector? The analysis in the report suggests that it will not. As many women could find themselves having to take lower skilled work and a significant pay cut. This would result in a widening of the overall gender pay gap and worsening levels of female poverty. And, given the significant contribution women’s earnings have made to low and middle income households over the past four decades, it could lead to poorer life chances for the hardest hit families too.

To view the full report  - download here